By Dave Vellante

The pressure to go “green” in general, and in storage specifically, is an opportunity to assess and modernize IT infrastructures. The power savings from storage, while not overwhelming, are meaningful and can be used to catalyze organizational change.

May 9, 2008—According to IDC, average data-center energy costs are growing at 20% per year and are expected to double by 2012. Discussions with Wikibon.org users confirm this expectation, as shown in the figure below. Compounding this dynamic is the fact that power density is going up for all IT equipment, at a rate of 20% to 30% per year. This has the following domino effects:

  • Much more power needs to be supplied to each square foot of a data center;
  • More power is required to cool hotter equipment; and
  • More heat extraction equipment needs to be supplied to each square foot of a data center.

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